Suburban Outfitters

BusinessWeek has decided it's time for its own list to match up with Time's both over-obvious and still often wrong All-TIME 100 Albums (I couldn't even bother to start arguing with its problems) and The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans (which calls Ronald Reagan the architect of the end of the Cold War--nuff said).

Nope, BusinessWeek's business is business, so they only have time for a Top 25, and here it's "The 25 Best Affordable Suburbs in the U.S." The exciting news is Livingston, NJ, as a suburb of Newark, makes the list. I grew up in a town right next to Livingston, its suburb, if you will. So I feel truly honored to be an East Hanover-ian, knowing I lived so close to one of the "suburbs [that] may not have the greatest schools in the country, or the lowest crime rates, but most of them do better than average in these categories." OK, Lake Wobegone it ain't.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to try to figure out why being a suburb of Newark is a good thing. I always felt we were a suburb of New York. Rumor has it New York was indifferent, but that's the big city for you.

In the not big city department, somehow Coralville, Iowa makes the BusinessWeek list as a suburb of Iowa City. To be a "sub-urb," don't you need an "urb"? The population of Iowa City is 62,887. The highlight of the town is a really good bookstore and wondrous thunderstorms that sometimes are a bit more than that. I guess I shouldn't be too particular given BW thought the best way to capture the joie de vivre that is Newark with a highway sign for the airport and an outbound plane.